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Joe Clancy 
Marya Montoya calls herself a hands-on trainer, and means it. After claiming a horse at Keeneland last October, she spent four hours with him at the barn waiting on a van. She exercises horses herself. She stuffs hay nets. She hotwalks, grooms and rolls bandages.
As a wise trainer once said, horses – Thoroughbred or Arabian – have the answers. The people just have questions. And of course there are questions about American-based Arabian star Valiant Boy’s trip to Dubai for Saturday’s $1 million Kahayla Classic.
He won’t say it, not to a reporter anyway, but Graham Motion really hopes to silence a few people Saturday at Meydan Racecourse in Dubai. Dual Eclipse Award winner Main Sequence runs in the $6 million Sheema Classic and does so without the anti-bleeding medication Lasix, which is not permitted in Dubai or the bulk of international racing.
Ron Anderson calls people on the phone all day long, hustling rides for jockey Joel Rosario, and has done the same for Jerry Bailey, Gary Stevens, Chris Antley, Garrett Gomez, Corey Nakatani and others. But even Anderson laughed at some of the circumstances around a phone call he made last week.
We said goodbye to Steve Graham today. He was a neighbor, a friend, a husband, a father, an uncle, a brother and oh so much more. Today, a “celebration of life” filled a local fire hall and included people he touched from all corners of his life. Two weeks ago, when he was still alive, I wrote this. His wife Denise read it to him and posted it on a table at the memorial service today. She said it was OK to let everyone else read it too.
Ready or not steeplechase fans, it’s time to jump. The 2015 season starts for real Saturday with the 49th annual Aiken Spring Races in Aiken, S.C. The first of six races starts at 1 p.m., but gates open early if you’re planning to be there.
Hall of Fame trainer H. Allen Jerkens, author of some of American racing’s greatest moments in a career that spanned parts of seven decades, died Wednesday in a Florida hospital due to an infection. He was 85.
Wendy Uzelac Wooley was beside herself. “I found Canoodler!” she squealed into the phone. Anyone who knows her understands the significance of that statement. The “Canoodler Saga” began six years ago when Wendy, then an amateur photographer, was shooting the races at Hawthorne Park in Illinois.
To know Valiant Boy is to love him. Ask his trainer Lizzie Merryman about him, and you’ll get plenty of reasons why.
Matt McCarron used to joke that he spent years intentionally not looking down at the legs of horses he rode in the morning as an exercise rider or in the afternoon as a steeplechase jockey.
